Varsity (Cambridge)
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| Type | Weekly newspaper |
|---|---|
| Format | Compact |
| Owner(s) | Varsity Publications Ltd |
| Editor | Millie Brierley |
| Founded | 1931 |
| Headquarters | 16 Mill Lane, Cambridge, CB2 1RX |
| Circulation | Up to 10,000 |
| ISSN | 1758-4442 |
| Website | www.varsity.co.uk |
Varsity is the oldest of Cambridge University's main student newspapers. It has been published continuously since 1947, and is one of only three fully independent student newspapers in the UK. It moved back to being a weekly publication in Michaelmas 2015, and as of this date, it is published every Friday during the University of Cambridge's term time.
Varsity has received numerous awards, including repeated recognition at the Guardian Student Media Awards receiving more than a half dozen individual and publication honours in the last decade, including the 2007 award for Publication Design of the Year.
Varsity is one of Britain's oldest student newspapers. Its first edition was published on 17 January 1931, as Varsity: the Cambridge University Illustrated (later The Varsity Weekly, and then the Cambridge Varsity Post). However, the first few years saw Varsity get off to a shaky start. In 1932, a controversy about some of its stories resulted in the editor being challenged to a duel, and the following year the paper went bankrupt (having lost £100).
A variety of attempts to revive Varsity led to the paper resurfacing periodically over the following decade, but it was not until 1947 that the paper was re-established permanently in its current form. Harry Newman Jr (1921–2001), a graduate of Harvard and the Harvard Business School, then studying for a postgraduate degree at St John's College, Cambridge, decided that Cambridge needed a proper American-style campus newspaper modeled on the Crimson. With the post-war rationing of newsprint, only publications that had existed before the War could be allocated paper, and so the obsolete publication name Varsity was used.
In a letter published in Varsity at the end of the year 1971-2, Harry Newman wrote,
Varsity began over a bottle of sherry in John's, matured over a bottle of port in Caius and blossomed with a firkin of ale over the Victoria Cinema, where we pecked out the first issue on trestle tables (without chairs). / Several of us—Bill Watson (Professor of Social Anthropology), David Widdicombe (distinguished Q.C.), John Noonan (American Professor of Canon Law), Dave Reece (Canadian Diplomat), Bill Howell (prominent architect), and Geoffrey Neame, among others—felt that what the University needed, in addition to its latest organisation, Y.A.S. (Yet Another Society), was an American-style college newspaper. ... It was truly an international effort, British (all three), Canadian, American, Hungarian, and Indian.
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